The Herald has a [facepalm] amusing article on people who think the world will end sometime soon, and 2012'ers.

People have been predicting the end of the world since it began - so no surprises there.

The end of the Mayan calendar (sophisticated as it is) just seems like the end of any other calendar - you start again at the beginning. And a good time to party.

The Mayans themselves certainly did not predict the end of the world.

In the event of something more realistic like a large solar flare event people with the bunker mentality or the cataclysmic world shortage of everything mentality would be the biggest danger to society.

Quebec in Canada had a huge black out in 1989 due to a cascading failure caused by a solar flare event, and a few places in the USA narrowly avoided similar problems at the same time.

Do utilities in NZ (telecoms, electricity, water) plan for and exercise for large solar flare events? or is it just a roughly once every 500 years event which no one cares about until it happens? Is NZ less at risk from solar flare infrastructure damage?